The Wine of Angels

But the cool, sassy voice she remembered no longer matched the face. Colette, dead, had a child’s face again, this was what was so awful. She looked so pitifully young. Younger than me.

And the smell. Colette’s sickly new perfume. Putrefying. A putrefying child. A little, swollen doll with a livid throat.

‘Pleeeeeease.’

The folds of the bin sack settled around Colette’s face with a crinkling sound.

‘Naaaaaw!’

In a frenzy, Jane scrambled back on to the stone mill wheel and balanced there, piling more and more empty bin sacks over the corpse, to lose the shape, lose the smell, a stink which would have so disgusted Colette. Her thoughts flitting fearfully into the forbidden unknown. How long had Colette been kept here before they killed her like a turkey? What had they done to her before they throttled her and took her clothes and dumped them in a ditch at King’s Oak Corner and dressed her in a crinkly black shroud? Hunky Lloyd Powell and his dignified father. What had they done to her?

She remembered what Lloyd had said about pests and badger-baiting. It’s a bit of fun. It’s cheap. Nobody gets harmed, ‘cept the badger and that’s his fault for being a badger.

Behind her, the door swung open. She didn’t even try to get down. What was the point?

‘Ah, you found her then, is it?’

Lloyd standing in the doorway with his legs apart. Lloyd sounding quite pleased, like Colette’s body was a birthday present they’d hidden.

‘Amazing what you find when you snoop around, girl. Still. It’s not very nice. Shouldn’t leave ’em unburied. Health risk, it is. I apologize.’

He sighed.

‘We got too much on, see, at present. And too many strangers about. We never wanted the slag, mind. We never done anything like that before. You don’t, not on your own doorstep, not on your own land. Stupid, that is. And then we couldn’t even bury her with all these police tramping around. Untidy. Hate that, I do.’

‘Stop it!’ she screeched, jumping down, putting the mill wheel between them. ‘I don’t want to know. You disgust me.’

Lloyd folded his arms, affronted. ‘Now, don’t you bloody come on like that with me, Jane. It was your fault. It was you sent me after the bitch. Oh, you gotter stop them, you gotter get them out, Lloyd, please, Lloyd, please, please, please ... You think I wanted that? Last thing we bloody wanted after that one Father brought back from Kingsland, did nothin’ but bloody cry, day and night ... But no, you had to keep on at me. Please, Lloyd, oh please, please—

‘Stop it!’ Jane shrieked and bent her head into her arms between her knees.

‘So I find the slag, and she’s looking at me like I’m God’s gift. Throwing herself all over me in the middle of our own orchard. Got rid of her mates fast enough, she had, and here she is, wandering around half naked all by herself. What was I supposed to do? You tell me that, Jane. Fetch her back to the restaurant, with her slobbering all over me, making up her lies? What would that do to my reputation. What would it do to Father?’

‘You didn’t have to bring her back here. Why couldn’t you just ... just make love to her ... whatever she wanted. You didn’t have to bring her back here!’

‘But we always fetches ’em back yere.’

Lloyd looked momentarily puzzled, like even he wasn’t quite sure why they always fetched them here. Just what he’d been brought up to do. A few stupid city people might think it was cruel, but it was a different way of life out here, wasn’t it?

Nobody gets harmed, ‘cept the badger and that’s his fault for being a badger.

Colette’s fault for being a slag.

Jane didn’t know how to talk to him any more. He wasn’t mad in the normal sense. He didn’t have the imagination to be mad. You couldn’t humour him; he had no humour.

Jane said, in a very low, faint voice, ‘I didn’t throw myself at anybody. I’m not going to spread any lies. Why can’t you just let me go?’

Lloyd shook his head in his brisk and businesslike way. ‘Not an option, Jane. You gotter see that. ‘Specially now.’

‘I’m sure your father’ll say to let me go. He’s a councillor, for God’s sake. My mother’s the—’

Lloyd sort of smiled. ‘You don’t really know Father, do you, Jane?’

And there, suddenly, was Mr Powell in her head, his council-chairman’s chain wound around his hands and tightened.

She braced herself to attack Lloyd. She would go for his balls.

Lloyd leaned back slightly on his heels and regarded her sorrowfully. ‘You try anything, Jane, on me, I got to tell you I’ll punch your face flat. Won’t offend Father. Won’t put Father off. Don’t look at the ole mantelpiece when you’re—’

She saw that Mr Powell wore no trousers and his shirt flap was sticking out. In Lloyd’s hip pocket, the mobile phone had begun to bleep.

‘And about time, too, Father,’ Lloyd said. ‘Excuse me.’

When he’d shut the door efficiently behind him and locked it again, Jane gave up, threw herself into the filthy straw. She was thirsty. She had no more tears left. Her chest hurt from sobbing. It was over. All she had left to hope for was that they would see her as a fox -fast, bang.

Please God, not a badger.

She thought back in horrified amazement to the side of herself which had persuaded her to go into the orchard with two full bottles of gassy cider. When you knew you were going to die quite soon, your body put into a clammy bin liner, the idea of being suspended in some parallel, ethereal, faerie universe was just the most awful, self-deluding crap imaginable. Lucy Devenish believed all this shit and they’d killed her too, and she hadn’t come back because all that afterlife stuff Mum preached was utter crap as well. What she’d had in the orchard that day had been some kind of black-out; she probably had a brain tumour and would have died anyway.

Jane lay there and sniffed the stinking straw because it was better than the piercing perfume of Colette. She, too, would start to smell like that, quite soon, when she was lying in her own bin sack, she and Colette decaying side by side, good mates turning bad. Jane sobbed and snuffled over this until, weak and exhausted – please God, not a badger – her body slackened into a thin sleep and Mr Powell was there, with his chain tight and his thing out, not smiling.

James lifted his chin, his eyes focused on the rafters. His tone was clipped.

‘Many times, I gather, the destruction of that document was mooted. But there was a sound reason for it being preserved. Eventually, about a hundred years ago, my great-grandfather suggested it should be entombed with its author. That’s all there is to it.’

‘James,’ said Merrily. ‘You can’t just tell us there was a sound reason without saying what it was.’

‘It’s a private—’

‘James, listen to me. About thirty years ago, a girl called Patricia Young went to work for your father in the stables. She got pregnant – never mind how I know, I know. She returned after the child was born, to try and persuade the father to face up to his responsibilities. He obviously did. He faced up to the responsibility he obviously felt to his family, and she was never seen again.’

Someone shouted out, ‘Patricia came back?

‘This is disgraceful,’ James snarled.

‘Bloody well come clean, Bull-Davies,’ a man yelled. Several people were on their feet. Ken Thomas had put on all the lights. Bull-Davies’s face was white, a vein throbbing in his forehead. He flung out his pointing arm at Merrily.

‘If there’s a bloody witch here, it’s you.’

‘Shame!’ Minnie Parry cried out and was echoed by at least a dozen people, some of them out in the aisle.

‘All right!’ James threw up his hands. ‘Reason we didn’t destroy that document is because it also vindicates Tom Bull. Didn’t kill Williams. Didn’t even order it done. Truth of it ... like Thomas a Becket all over again. Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest? One of his ... servants did it. And that’s all